That sounds good to me. Foreign taxes are hard to find information about, but everything else would make for a good project from where I sit. It may be possible to scour some of the old forums to see what type of questions people have asked and what sort of links were posted.
If I keep tossing and turning the way I am tonight I may I have it done by Tuesday. It will always be a mystery to my why I can drink a pot of coffee in the morning and be napping by 11, but three little sips after dinner and I'm up all night.
TRDRMAC, You must be as bad as I am with the coffee bud...I can drink 10 cups of coffee in the morning and by noon ...just like you I am ready to zonk out!....Same problem at night...I better not even touch a single drop or else I am up all night to....its tuff, cause I come from a family of coffee drinkers...and I love coffee.
TRDRMAC, Have you seen the "Tax Guide for Traders" and read through it...its pretty good. www.fairmark.com/traders/index.htm I was reviewing some of the old threads like we said we were going to do and came across it...you might have already seen it.
Vinigar, Actually I had passed over that, so I glad you posted the link. When going back through it seemed like there were about six months of threads with most of the focus on a core of questions. It may be interesting to compare this to the greentrader book. On their site they were really railing on someone's advice, the name went unmentioned. Out of curiosity, I know you mentioned using software to track your trades, saying that shorts were not handled well. How do you handle multi-day trades via download? Right now I have a decent paper system that keeps me organized, but this year I am making a lot more trades so there may be a simpler way to go. But one of the problems would be opening a trade on 5/1/02 and closing it out on say 5/12/02, is there a solution to this?
trfrmac, I understand what you are saying about greetrader railing on someone's advice. Some of these web sites that have information on taxes are not trustworthy. The Trader Tax Guide at Fairmark Press was written by Kay Thomas. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1980. He has 20 plus years experience as a tax lawyer. The Tax Guide that he posts on line is FREE. Although its is mainly a guideline and does not get into the nitty gritty details that you and I have been discussing...I think that it is a good overview of tax issues facing traders like you and me. The biggest thing I found to be of interest was the steps involved with declaring your self as a Mark to Market type of Trader. Lastly. I have gone to other web sites in search of information on declaring the Mark to Market election. Their information was not clear and ambiguous and primarily interested in finding a way to get your money.
TRDRMAC, Originally posted by trdrmac Out of curiosity, I know you mentioned using software to track your trades, saying that shorts were not handled well. How do you handle multi-day trades via download? Right now I have a decent paper system that keeps me organized, but this year I am making a lot more trades so there may be a simpler way to go. But one of the problems would be opening a trade on 5/1/02 and closing it out on say 5/12/02, is there a solution to this? Trdrmac...I trade with IB...they have a daily download that you can use that will dump to EXCEL. Next, they have the ability to download your files into Quicken Deluxe. As far as I am concerned, I am sorry that I spent the money on Quicken Home and Business, to use with IB. IB's web site touts that you can download your trades into Quicken if you have Quickens software. Like you, my trades have increased dramatically and I was looking for good software to handle it all.To be honest it was a bad purchase. Why?: 1. Quicken will download your trades from IB automatically...nice huh.....wrong!.....the method used by IB to earmark shorts does not jive with Quickens Software....it downloads it alight but the trades are all jumbled and do not match up because it can't justify any short trades that you had....so what happens is that you must manually go back into Quicken and fix everything, justify all the transactions...this can take hours and hours. It was such a nightmare that I wound up imputing all my transaction and trades by hand. 2. Next, the other reason I bought Quicken was that I knew that the information from your trades could then be downloaded into Turbo Tax. Well, it downloaded all the transactions and yep it did a pretty good job...it automatically put everything onto my schedule D for me. (This year will be first year for me as Mark to Market)...because I had not filed for Mark to Market, I was subject to the Wash sale Rule. 3. Which brings me to the next major problem...Quicken/Turbo Tax, did not automatically handle all the Wash Sales...guess what...yep you guessed it....I had to go back in and handle all my trades one by one and identify them as to whether or not the wash sale rule applied. This took hours and hours. This year will be different...I have filed for the Mark to Market election...this means that all my trades will not go on schedule D and I do not have to worry about the Wash sale rules....instead my income will be reported on form 4797. As far as I can tell you just report your income from your trades on form 4797 and just<<< ATTACH YOUR LIST OF TRADES TO YOUR TAXES>>>....this means that form 4797 does not get populated by any software. ( If I am right about just attaching your list of trades) If the above is true and you have elected the Mark to Market option...then it makes life a whole lot easier. Green trader is supposed to have a software program that handles IB's method of denoting short sales...which means that you could easily download your trades into their software, print it out and attach it to your taxes...all you need do then is put your totals onto form 4797. I am reluctant to use Green Trader because I already have been burnt by IB and Quicken.....so here I go again and spend money for another program and find out later that it to does not work as I thought it would...however, greentrader has gotten some good reviews here on EliteTrader by some of our fellow Traders. If greentrader works....then I could download from IB, daily weekly and monthly statements....when done I could just print them out and attach everything to my taxes....but I am skeptical and not sure about it.
"Tax Guide for Traders" was a good resource and good overview. There was mention on the site of a software package/service (?) that may be of use to help out with manual entries, etc. It is called gainskeeper. Here is what is claimed "gainskeeper offers the only comprehensive online Capital Gain/Loss calculator and trading decision tools today. gainskeeper's service interfaces with investors like many of today's portfolio trackers. Investors manually input or import their trading activity from Excel, Money & Quicken QIF files under the gk Investor and gk Trader Services. The difference is that gainskeeper's service will automatically create Capital Gain/Loss Reports -- Producing an IRS Schedule D at tax time -- and will adjust your portfolio for wash sales and corporate actions back to 1/1/1999. This includes stock splits, stock dividends, reverse splits, symbol name changes, distributions, spin-offs, mergers, liquidations, reorganizations, and return of capital. gainskeeper does not currently track Options trading. Investments purchased prior to 1/1/1999 can be entered into the system, but require the user to adjust for corporate actions affecting the security prior to 1/1/99. A single gk loginid can be used to record investments from multiple brokerages, multiple accounts in a single brokerage, even multiple owners (i.e. married couples filing jointly)." My question...... Has anyone had experience with Gains Keeper (or even sellsignal) with respect to helping out at tax time. I would be very interested to get feedback on these since 1. you can import from Excel 2. automatically (?) determines wash sales for you 3. outputs the Schedule D that you need for your tax return. Thanks!
Kosiosko, Gains Keeper is pretty good from what I hear...especially if you have not filed for Mark to Market Status and you need to keep track of your wash sales. On the other hand I do not know how user friendly it is and what tax programs that it may interface with. I don't know if you can dump it into Turbo Tax for instance. Many of these things tout that they can do this or that for you...that could be true. However they may not work well with other software that you need to use. Check out my previous post and you'll see what I mean.